Network security management is becoming a more difficult problem as networks grow in size and become a more integral part of organizational operations. Attacks on networks are growing both due to the intellectual challenge such attacks represent for hackers and due to the increasing payoff for the serious attacker. Furthermore, the attacks are growing beyond the current capability of security management tools to identify and quickly respond to those attacks. As various attack methods are tried and ultimately repulsed, the attackers will attempt new approaches with more subtle attack features. Thus, maintaining network security is on-going, ever changing, and an increasingly complex problem.
Computer network attacks can take many forms and any one attack may include many security events of different types. Security events are anomalous network conditions each of which may cause an anti-security effect to a computer network. Security events include stealing confidential or private information; producing network damage through mechanisms such as viruses, worms, or Trojan horses; overwhelming the network's capability in order to cause denial of service, and so forth.
In particular, the generation and spread of computer viruses is a major problem in modern day computing. Generally, a computer virus is a program that is capable of attaching to other programs or sets of computer instructions, replicating itself, and performing unsolicited or malicious actions on a computer system. Generally, computer viruses are designed to spread by attaching to floppy disks or data transmissions between computer users, and are designed to do damage while remaining undetected. The damage done by computer viruses may range from mild interference with a program, such as the display of an unwanted political message in a dialog box, to the complete destruction of data on a user's hard drive. It is estimated that new viruses are created at a rate of over 100 per month.
A variety of security application programs have been developed to detect and destroy computer viruses. As is known in the art, a common method of detecting viruses is to use a virus scanning engine to scan for known computer viruses in executable files, application macro files, disk boot sectors, etc. Generally, computer viruses are comprised of binary sequences called “virus signatures.” Upon the detection of a virus signature by the virus scanning engine, a virus disinfection program may then be used to extract the harmful information from the infected code, thereby disinfecting that code.
Since various security events are constantly changing over time, there is a need to continuously update the security application programs that are used to protect against such security events. For example, new viruses require the generation and incorporation of new virus signatures in each security application program. This is often accomplished by establishing communication between client computers on which the security application programs are running, and a server equipped with the latest security updates.
The foregoing update process is effective only when the client computers are capable of being connected to the server to receive the aforementioned updates. Unfortunately, this connectivity is not available in some systems. There is thus a need for a system which is network connection-independent, while still being capable of updating software to protect against security events and for other purposes.